Lunatic difficulty curve

[lvrossem]

In my quest to beat all games on their highest difficulty, I think I'm gonna move on to Awakening, which I beat on Hard/Classic an eternity ago. Anytime I see content of Awakening Lunatic, popular opinions seem to be that Fred has to carry you early on, and that a Chrom/Robin solo is optimal. However, I really don't feel like playing like this, and I hope that it can be treated as just a regular challenging playthrough (past the first few chapters at least). Does anyone have experience with playing Lunatic/Classic in a non-cheese way. Also I'm never using any DLC

[samthedigital]

You can play with a full team if you like, yes. My suggestion would be to stick to 3ish gen 1 combat pairs, kids, your dancer, and staff bots. You can play without kids if you like, but that is a lot more difficult if you want to use a full team. If you concentrate your exp on fewer gen 1 units your units start snowballing earlier and the kids are going to be a lot better. Lunatic+ can also be beaten this way, and it is the way I played through it.

[lvrossem]

good to hear that! seeing all of those characters and kids again will be a big nostalgia blast, I'm sure looking forward to it! I'll probably try not to over-engineer it like I did in Conquest Lunatic and just kinda use the characters I like, while paying a bit of attention to skill inheritance

[samthedigital]

I would recommend using a resource like fire emblem wod or something similar so you can plan around ambush spawns assuming you don't have them memorized already by the way. Blocking some ambush spawns and keeping your units away from others will avoid the most common problem with deploying squishy units entirely.

Edited June 9 by samthedigital

[SnowFire]

I'll be That Guy: playing with a full team, no DLC, is way way way harder.  You don't necessarily have to do a solo, but some amount of XP-focusing helps a lot, because of how much nonsense you have to face on enemy phase.  if you're down for that, go for it!  But...  it is going to be much, much harder than a Lunatic playthrough that focuses around, say, just 6 characters in 3 pair-ups.

I did a Lunatic playthrough that used a wide team, but I also used the DLC grind map to "catch up" laggards (whyyyyy does Miriel join at Level 1).  Even when trying to keep levels equal, it just gets real scary - very easy to be in a situation where, say, having lowbies poke their head out into danger means they can only survive a single combat reliably, so you throw Tharja / Robin or whatever out instead, and whoops they ate half the XP of the map in a single enemy phase.  And again, this was with some occasional DLC grind to help out.

If you decide to go for it, my biggest recommendation would be...  well, there's three strong strategies for Awakening you probably already know about: Nosferatu, Galeforce, and defense-stacking.  Nos strats tend to focus all the XP into (Sorc Robin / Tharja / Henry / someone else class-changed to Sorc / etc.), and so may not be great for a keep-levels-equal playthrough, although having a Nos user as an emergency get-out-of-trouble card may still be useful.  Galeforce strats can be great for killing the boss before tons of reinforcements spawn, but also tend to leave some XP on the table.  This means, that for the type of playthrough you're looking for, I'd recommend considering defense-stacking strats.  Something like a Nowi / Gaius pair-up early can be good at surviving waves of enemies swarming your position, but also leave a bunch of weakened enemies for your lowbies to clean up and equalize XP.

You probably know this already, but skirmish maps in Lunatic tend to exacerbate level differences, not equalize them.  They're scaled to your highest level units (unlike Hard-mode Skirmishes), and the Risen all charge your position from turn 1.  It means that you may well have to have your high-level units who can survive distract half the map so that your lowbies stand a shot against stragglers...  but then your high-level units just took more XP, which will make it even tougher for the lowbies in the next Skirmish which now will scale even higher.  It makes training up child units, who join at L10 only after you've beaten some fairly badass maps, very annoying.  (But see above, I shamelessly used DLC instead for this, but doing it without DLC is a lot tougher.)

[samthedigital]

2 hours ago, SnowFire said:

It makes training up child units, who join at L10 only after you've beaten some fairly badass maps, very annoying.  (But see above, I shamelessly used DLC instead for this, but doing it without DLC is a lot tougher.)

Without resorting to DLC the easiest way to train child units is to use effective weaponry and Rescue them out of danger. For example a common strategy I employ is class swapping Morgan to Archer and have them one round wyverns in their join map. This is twice as effective if they already have Galeforce, and they catch up rather quickly especially if some of the earlier paralogues are still available. This does require some knowledge of ambush spawns as noted above, but it is otherwise safe (and fairly easy to do in my opinion).

3 hours ago, SnowFire said:

You don't necessarily have to do a solo, but some amount of XP-focusing helps a lot, because of how much nonsense you have to face on enemy phase.  if you're down for that, go for it!  But...  it is going to be much, much harder than a Lunatic playthrough that focuses around, say, just 6 characters in 3 pair-ups.

That's the reason kids and staff bots are so effective. They allows us to use a smaller team to get the snowballing effect going while still ending up with a full team of useful units since there's less competition for combat exp than the alternative. I'm not sure what the TC counts as using a full team, but I guess that's up to interpretation.

3 hours ago, SnowFire said:

If you decide to go for it, my biggest recommendation would be...  well, there's three strong strategies for Awakening you probably already know about: Nosferatu, Galeforce, and defense-stacking.  Nos strats tend to focus all the XP into (Sorc Robin / Tharja / Henry / someone else class-changed to Sorc / etc.), and so may not be great for a keep-levels-equal playthrough, although having a Nos user as an emergency get-out-of-trouble card may still be useful.  Galeforce strats can be great for killing the boss before tons of reinforcements spawn, but also tend to leave some XP on the table.  This means, that for the type of playthrough you're looking for, I'd recommend considering defense-stacking strats.  Something like a Nowi / Gaius pair-up early can be good at surviving waves of enemies swarming your position, but also leave a bunch of weakened enemies for your lowbies to clean up and equalize XP.

Those things are still fantastic when using more units. Galeforce allows for some nasty player phases especially when combined with Rescue, dance, etc. You can also have multiple units that use Sol/Nos/etc for enemy phase tanking. There are also a handful of other builds that can be effective, but it's not quite as useful on Lunatic as it is in Lunatic+ where you might want to have a variety of builds to deal with different skill combinations.

[lvrossem]

thanks for the many replies. Thing is, I wouldn't really mind a cheese Nostank solo for Lunatic+, but I need to unlock that first and I don't wanna do a run like that twice in a row. Also, the term defense stacking is new to me for some reason. Never came across it during my Fates Lunatic playthroughs, so what is it exactly?

[samthedigital]

1 hour ago, lvrossem said:

thanks for the many replies. Thing is, I wouldn't really mind a cheese Nostank solo for Lunatic+, but I need to unlock that first and I don't wanna do a run like that twice in a row. Also, the term defense stacking is new to me for some reason. Never came across it during my Fates Lunatic playthroughs, so what is it exactly?

You can stack breaker skills and things like Pavise, Dual Guard, etc. Fred can use this to good effect to carry Lunatic if he wants as an example. When/if you get to Lunatic+ I would recommend taking a look at Kuroi's thread here if you want to be lazy about finding strategies for the early game.

[lvrossem]

Actually, I might just do a more laid-back Lunatic run which allows DLC and thus lets me use a varied and fun team. Since the point is to beat all the games on the hardest difficulty without DLC, I'm not actually violating any rules by doing whatever I want on base Lunatic 🙂

Edited June 11 by lvrossem

[SnowFire]

22 hours ago, lvrossem said:

Also, the term defense stacking is new to me for some reason. Never came across it during my Fates Lunatic playthroughs, so what is it exactly?

Just what it sounds like - building a really, really tanky unit that reduces enemies to just pinging for minimal or even 0 damage (comes up with, say, some Benny / Effie / Xander builds, where reducing enemy damage to 0 is important after getting Spy's Shuriken Poison Strike'd to 1 HP in Ryoma's map).  XP isn't level-scaled in Awakening nearly as harshly as Fates - you'll still get some basic XP even when vastly overlevel, unlike Fates giving you 1 XP in such situations.  So if you have a tank like Frederick / Kellam / Nowi (first half) get ahead of the XP curve, they just kinda stop taking damage, especially if they have an A or S support to increase the rate of Dual Guards.  Similar units more for the late game are Tiki / Nah / Kjelle.  Basically, it's hard to reason about enemy phase in Awakening, because stuff like Dual Strikes can result in surprise surging of your damage = your unit holding the chokepoint goes on a killing spree = they have to survive more combats than you thought.  Or even stuff like random enemies proc'ing % chance of bonus damage skills like Luna (in Fates, these are usually locked to bosses a la C23 Takumi).  So having overkill defense is one way to be more secure in "yes, this unit won't die if I send it out into the oncoming hordes."

1 hour ago, lvrossem said:

Actually, I might just do a more laid-back Lunatic run which allows DLC and thus lets me use a varied and fun team.🙂

Good times.  I will say that the reward from Champions of Yore 3 - All Stats +2 - is one of those quietly crazy good skills.  CoY3 can be beaten without TOO much trouble and +2 to all stats is like +4 extra levels.  Amazing stuff, especially early in the game.

[lvrossem]

I'm gonna try to find an Awakening ROM with all DLC so I can use an HD texture pack (is it truly pirating if I still bought the game for real earlier?), but only after I finish exams and my ongoing Rev Lunatic completionist run.

[lvrossem]

who would be the most feasible of these 6 gen 1 units in your opinion? I assume Robin, Chrom and Tharja to be among them? @samthedigital

Edited June 12 by lvrossem

[samthedigital]

34 minutes ago, lvrossem said:

who would be the most feasible of these 6 gen 1 units in your opinion? I assume Robin, Chrom and Tharja to be among them? @samthedigital

What do you mean by feasible exactly? I would just about always use Robin for obvious reasons. Chrom is a unit who I'll usually use passively and grab skills that help the lead out. Fred!Sumia is one of my more common pairings since Fred likes the speed, and it doubles as a good way to nab Sumia some kills to start snowballing. Keep in mind that you'd need to unlock Owain or Severa's paralogue to get Cynthia early. Otherwise it depends on who I feel like using; most early game units are feasible to use as long as you're not spreading exp between too many units early on. I don't actually like using Tharja all that much because of her starting stats, but she's great once she gets going of course. I'd probably go with Laurent instead if I want a pure Nos user since Miriel just needs to get to promotion to staff spam her way to Tomefaire. As a bonus Gregor is a good support partner and doesn't need a lot of investment to pass good skills to Laurent; both Sol and Armsthrift are really good options.